Apple had the luxury of being the first to sell smartphones, they could do it in whatever language they wanted. Android could never have tried to do the same thing.
Apple were not the first smartphones. Without even nitpicking on Palm, etc, you're forgetting Blackberry.
I wouldn't call the blackberries smartphones. They were feature phones where one of the features was a proprietary email system.
There were touch-screen smartphones with no keyboards before the iPhone...
Blackberry had a real OS, push email and third party apps. Everything the first iPhone had when it comes to "smart"
Erm, Nokia?
Nokia's smartphone line was already several generations old when Apple introduced the first iPhone... The Symbian OS had a 67% market share in smartphones in 2006. The first version of the Communicator with 3rd party software ecosystem, the 9210, was released in 2001!
Objective-C 1983 creation date :)
Came with Steve Jobs from NeXT and was used in OS X way before 2007 iPhone debut.